Windows 10 Is Now Powering Half a Billion Active Devices

After nearly 8 months since its last announcement, Microsoft has today shared that it has achieved the milestone of 500 million active Windows 10 machines. The company is still half way to its goal of 1 billion devices running Windows 10 by 2018.

Windows 10 grew by two-thirds in last year

Today’s numbers come after the company had revealed that 400 million devices were running Windows 10 in September last year. After releasing Windows 10 in July 2015, Microsoft had an ambitious goal of having 1 billion Windows 10 devices by 2018. However, the company had to revise these numbers last year when it said that “it will take longer than FY18 for us to reach our goal of 1 billion monthly active devices.”

With only 500 million active Windows 10 users, the Redmond software maker still has a long way to go before reaching that goal. Microsoft had offered a free upgrade offer to Windows 7, 8 and Windows 8.1 users, driving early adoption of its newest desktop operating system. However, since the end of the free upgrade offer last July, the growth seemed to hit brakes. Apparently, it didn’t. From 300 million machines last year to 500 million this May, Windows 10 has still grown by two-thirds in a year. Mainly because while Microsoft may have officially stopped offering the free upgrade to Windows 7 and 8 users, it is still possible to install even the latest version of Windows 10 using a valid Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 key.

The numbers are going to continue getting better as more enterprises upgrade their systems to Windows 10. With the launch of the new Surface Laptop and education-focused Windows 10 S, the operating system will continue to get more active machines. However, it will certainly take way longer than 2018 for Microsoft to reach the goal of 1 billion active Windows 10 devices considering the near-death of Windows 10 Mobile.